Sarepta: anecdote, data, surrogate outcomes, and the FDA
The Duchenne’s treatment Sarepta (eteplirsen) has been in the news this week, as a troubling example of the FDA lowering its bar for approval of new medicines. The FDA expert advisory panel decided not to approve this treatment, because the evidence for any benefit is weak; but there was extensive lobbying from well-organised patients and, eventually, the FDA overturned the opinion of its own panel. There […] (Source: badscience)
Source: badscience - September 30, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Ben Goldacre Tags: bad science Source Type: blogs
The Cancer Drugs Fund is producing dangerous, bad data: randomise everyone, everywhere!
There are recurring howls in my work. One of them is this: in general, if you don’t know which intervention works best, then you should randomise everyone, everywhere. This is for good reason: uncertainty costs lives, through sub-optimal treatment. Wherever randomised trials are the right approach, you should embed them in routine clinical care. This is an argument I’ve made, with colleagues, in […] (Source: badscience)
Source: badscience - September 28, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Ben Goldacre Tags: bad science Source Type: blogs
Taking transparency beyond results: ethics committees must work in the open
Here’s a useful paper we’ve just published in the BMJ, documenting problems in transparency around approval processes for randomised trials. There’s a basic rule in clinical research: you’re only supposed to do a trial comparing two treatments when you really don’t know which one is best, otherwise you’d be knowingly randomising half your participants to an […] (Source: badscience)
Source: badscience - September 23, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Ben Goldacre Tags: bad science Source Type: blogs
Events in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Auckland
Hi there, I’m doing a few events in Australia and NZ this week: in Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland (only 25 tickets left), and Brisbane. Here‘s a good fun interview I did with The Conversation that gets very nerdy, on the poor state of science, COMPare, statins, reproducibility and transparency. I’ll post a big backlog of interviews, and papers, over […] (Source: badscience)
Source: badscience - September 23, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Ben Goldacre Tags: bad science Source Type: blogs
Ban academics from talking to ministers? We should train them to do it!
The Cabinet Office has come up with a crazy plan to ban academics like me from talking to politicians and civil servants. In this piece I explain why that is an almost surreally stupid idea. I also describe how I hustle, in Whitehall, to try and get government policy changed on open data, scientific transparency, and […] (Source: badscience)
Source: badscience - March 7, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Ben Goldacre Tags: evidence based policy politics Source Type: blogs
So this company Cyagen is paying authors for citations in academic papers.
Here’s a strange thing, a seedy curio rather than a massive scandal, but I’d be interested to know what you make of it. This week lots of academics all received the same unsolicited marketing email from a large well known research company called Cyagen, who make transgenic mice, stem cells, and so on. The email was headed […] (Source: badscience)
Source: badscience - August 14, 2015 Category: Science Authors: Ben Goldacre Tags: bad science Source Type: blogs
Fixing flaws in science must be professionalised. By me in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology.
Me and a dozen other academics all just wrote basically the same thing about Open Science in the Journal Of Clinical Epidemiology. After the technical bits, me and Tracey get our tank out. That’s for a reason: publishing academic papers about structural problems in science is a necessary condition for change, but it’s not sufficient. We don’t need any […] (Source: badscience)
Source: badscience - July 10, 2015 Category: Science Authors: Ben Goldacre Tags: bad science Source Type: blogs
New BMJ editorial: “ How Medicine is Broken, and How We Can Fix It ”
There are some big problems in medicine, and the public are right to be concerned about our shortcomings. Last week we found out that the Chief Medical Officer has written to the Academy of Medical Sciences, asking for an authoritative review into problems in the evidence we use to choose treatments, focusing especially on concerns […] (Source: badscience)
Source: badscience - June 23, 2015 Category: Science Authors: Ben Goldacre Tags: bad science Source Type: blogs
